gaian consortium 05 - the titan trap Read online

  Even though she knew she should keep her mouth shut and do what he said, she couldn’t helping asking, “Seriously? Wouldn’t it be easier for me to turn around and let them capture you here on Titan so we wouldn’t have to waste all that fuel?”

  “Just head to Europa.”

  Cassidy shrugged and began laying in the new course. Taking the planets’ current respective positions into account, it would take them approximately two standard days to reach Europa. What the hell she was supposed to do with this madman in her lap for two days, she had no idea.

  Cheer up, she told herself, as she fed the new data into the computer and let it churn away at setting their course. Those GDF fighters travel way faster than the Avalon. They’ll catch up with us in a day, tops.

  She heard a rustling behind her, and shifted in her seat so she could see what her kidnapper was up to. Not that she moved very much — she didn’t want to be too obvious — but if he was planning on shooting her in the back of the head once the course was set, she’d kind of like to have some advance warning.

  That didn’t seem to be his current plan. The rustling sound was coming from the enviro suit as he was undoing its fastenings and climbing out of it. She couldn’t blame him for that; the suit was intended for Titan’s bitterly cold temperatures, and although it could be adjusted somewhat, it probably felt achingly hot in the Avalon’s cabin, which always seemed on the warm side of comfortable no matter what she did to calibrate the climate-control system.

  Underneath the suit he wore dark gray prison garb — a pullover shirt and baggy pants. And when he reached up to remove the helmet, Cassidy had to bite her lip from letting out a shocked gasp.

  Yes, he was an escaped convict, probably a mass murderer or a serial killer or something equally vile, and he’d hijacked her ship and pointed a gun at her head…but he was also gorgeous. The kind of gorgeous that would have definitely intimidated her if she’d encountered him in a bar or a club, and somehow seemed even more impressive in close quarters like this. Regular features, full lips…and some Asian mixed in there, judging by the dark almond eyes and sharp cheekbones.

  Then she realized she was staring, when she’d meant to only catch a quick glimpse out of the corner of her eye. She turned back to the controls and pretended to be absorbed in the schematics displayed on the console’s scratched screen.

  He approached her then, taking a seat in the copilot’s chair. After transferring the pulse pistol to his other hand, he held out his right one to her. “Derek Tagawa.”

  Since when did hijackers introduce themselves like they were attending some sort of meet-and-greet? Cassidy looked at him blankly, and did not extend her own hand. “Captain Evans.”

  “Captain’s an interesting name for a woman.”

  Oh, so now he was trying to be charming. It had probably worked for him in the past, with a face like that. Maybe that was how he seduced his victims, by letting them think he was some outrageously good-looking, funny, sweet guy who then turned out to be an axe murderer. Wait, did people even use axes anymore? Since she’d never actually set foot on Gaia, had spent her entire life on the Moon or shuttling around the Solar System’s colonized planets, she was a little fuzzy on some of the finer points of life on her “home” world.

  Fine. She’d play along. It really didn’t matter if he knew her name or not. “Cassidy.”

  “Thank you,” he said quietly.

  She really didn’t get him at all. Were convicts generally this polite? And the way his gaze kept flicking toward her, then moving away, as if he wanted to stare at her but knew it would be rude. It wasn’t lascivious at all, which she’d halfway expect from someone who’d been locked up in MaxSec for years and hadn’t seen a woman in all that time. No, it was more…admiring? But that couldn’t be right. She didn’t have on a speck of makeup, and her hair probably looked like it had been combed by one of the atmospheric thrusters.

  For a second or two she didn’t say anything, but only returned her attention to the readouts in front of her. Calculating exactly how long it was going to take to get to Europa was more difficult than she’d first thought, as she had data for how the ship handled when fully loaded and again when it was empty, and not so much for its current state, which was with a cargo hold a little less than half full.

  Then she asked, “Why Europa?”

  “I’ll be getting some assistance there.”

  Assistance. “Was that how you broke out of MaxSec?”

  The faintest ghost of a grim smile touched his mouth. “You could say it was a group effort.”

  Stranger and stranger. An undertaking of that sort would require a lot of planning and resources. Who was this guy? “All that trouble to get a murderer out of prison?”

  Abruptly, the smile disappeared. “I’m not a murderer.”

  “Oh?” Her gaze flicked to the pistol, which he’d returned to his right hand. “Then you don’t really need that, do you?”

  He hesitated, then pressed the button to engage the safety and shoved the gun into his waistband. “Better?”

  “Much.” She swiveled her chair so she was more or less facing him. “So what does a person have to do to get sentenced to MaxSec if it’s not murder? Political kidnapping?” That did happen from time to time, mostly with execs from one of the mega-corps, like MonAg or Hallbrecht. Most of the time the ransoms were paid, but the perpetrators usually didn’t get much of a chance to enjoy their ill-gotten wealth before the authorities caught up with them. No capital punishment on Gaia any longer — the Eridanis had expressed their distaste for the practice and made sure it was abolished before they signed any treaties with the Gaians — but Cassidy had a feeling that life imprisonment, especially on Titan, wasn’t much of a trade-off.

  “No,” Derek Tagawa replied. His expression remained grim. “Let’s just say the Consortium likes to use MaxSec as its own personal oubliette.”

  “Oubliette?” she repeated, rolling the unfamiliar syllables around in her mouth. She’d never heard the term before. “What’s that?”

  “Back in the day, it was an overlooked cell in a dungeon, the sort of place you put someone you wanted the world to forget. Well, Gaia’s kind of short on dungeons, but MaxSec does well enough in a pinch.”

  “So why would they want the world to forget about you?” Not that she really believed anything he was telling her, but if she kept him talking, then at least he wouldn’t get any funny ideas. Or so she hoped.

  “That’s a long story.”

  “It’s a long way to Europa,” she pointed out.

  He didn’t reply, only stared out the window, at the brilliant starfield that surrounded them, broken here and there by a pale disk that Cassidy knew was one of Saturn’s moons, even if she couldn’t identify any of them in particular, not at this distance. At last he replied, “You’d never believe me.”

  That was true — he hadn’t even started talking yet, and already she was pretty sure she couldn’t allow herself to trust a single thing that came out of his mouth. But he didn’t have to know that. “Try me.”

  Another weighty silence. She waited, listening to the soft hum of the climate-control system, the myriad little creaks and pops the ship made. The freighter had been her home for so long that she was accustomed to all of its sounds, knew which ones were normal and which ones were telling her that she had repairs she really couldn’t afford ahead of her.

  At last he said, “I’m not a murderer.”

  “You told me that already.”

  “Or a kidnapper. Or a serial rapist.”

  “Environmental terrorist?” she suggested.

  His lips twitched. “No, not that, either, although I guess you could say it’s a little closer to the mark. I’m a scientist. I was working for GARP.”

  A terrible name for something that was supposed to be doing a great deal of good. The Greater Asian Reclamation Project had been going full force for some ten years now, as the Consortium government sent its best scientists and engineers
to the ravaged Asian continent on Gaia, burying the countless billions who had died during the Cloud, cleansing the land and the air so it might again support a human population. It was grim work, and the personnel engaged in it were generally respected for their efforts. So what Derek Tagawa had managed to do that was so heinous, it ended up with him being sent to MaxSec, Cassidy couldn’t begin to guess.

  “That doesn’t sound like a punishable offense,” she said, and settled back in her seat, waiting to hear what sorts of excuses he planned to make.

  “No, as long as you don’t go digging where the government doesn’t want you to.”

  She didn’t reply, only lifted an eyebrow and crossed her arms. Great, another conspiracy theorist convinced that the big bad Consortium was evil incarnate. She’d heard it all, from seedy bars in Luna City to the waiting rooms of understaffed medical clinics, and although she was the first to admit that the Consortium wasn’t perfect, she also didn’t think it was quite as awful as some wanted to believe. Mercenary, yes. Grasping, certainly. Actively malevolent? Probably not.

  And really, if anyone should be holding a grudge against the government and its policies, it should be her, considering it was those very policies that had prevented her father from getting the medical attention he needed, resulting in his death. Now, some would argue that it was Owen Evans’ fault in the first place, for getting stuck through the ribs during a barroom brawl gone horribly wrong, but even so, his injuries weren’t so life-threatening that the medics couldn’t have patched him up and sent him on his way. Everyone knew there wasn’t much modern medicine couldn’t fix. No, the real problem was that his insurance didn’t include the expense of the open-heart surgery those injuries required, and so all the doctors could do was make her father comfortable while he slowly bled to death inside.

  Cassidy had fought the hospital bureaucracy, but their hands were tied, too. Even attempting to throw more money at the insurance company hadn’t worked, as its reps had only informed her that the new coverage wouldn’t be effective for an illness or injury incurred before said coverage went into effect. So she’d sat and watched her father die for no good reason, and had to pick up the pieces afterward. But that didn’t mean the government and its policies were actively evil, merely mercenary. Although she supposed there were some people who would argue they were one and the same.

  At length she asked, “So where did you go digging?”

  He leaned forward slightly, hands placed flat on his knees. “I really didn’t intend to be digging at all. I was there to monitor the air processors — they’re similar to what we use in terraforming, although on a smaller scale, since we’re only cleaning the air, not trying to alter its actual chemical composition.”

  She nodded.

  “I’d just been transferred to Hunan Province, which was one of the worst-hit areas. The air processors had been chewing away at it for decades, and we were told that it was finally safe enough to get boots on the ground and obtain some readings that way.” A pause, and he seemed to stare down at his hands. The golden-brown skin was crisscrossed with scars, some of them old and pale, some raw and half-healed. Cassidy couldn’t help wondering how he’d gotten them.

  “Anyway, I knew that a military team had been there before us, but I didn’t think much of it. Just SOP, to make sure the area was safe enough to bring in a bunch of civilians. When I really started analyzing the data, however, it seemed…off. Strange concentrations of potassium and some other heavy metals, things that should’ve been scrubbed out by the air processors.”

  “What was it?” Cassidy asked, despite her inner vow not to seem too interested in his story.

  His fingers tightened on his knees, and she noticed he wouldn’t look at her directly. “I asked for permission to go out and personally inspect the processors, since I was worried that something had gone wrong with their programming or their calibration. That permission was denied.”

  “By whom?”

  “The whole operation is under the control of a GEC officer named Colonel Marquez.”

  “GEC?” she echoed, surprised. Why would the Gaian Exploration Commission be in control of an operation on its home planet’s surface? Wasn’t its entire mission to discover and exploit new worlds, rather than Gaia itself?

  “The rationale was that the GEC has far more experience with terraforming and the equipment associated with it, so that’s why its personnel were put in charge.”

  “Ah.” It still didn’t make a lot of sense to her, but then again, she’d sort of stopped trying to figure out why the Consortium did half the things it did.

  Derek Tagawa went on, “I asked Colonel Marquez to explain the problems with the readings, and he said he couldn’t risk a valuable member of the team on a mission like that, but that he’d send one of his own engineers to look into it. I didn’t like it, but I decided to let it go. But the readings kept getting worse, and so it seemed obvious to me that his people were burying the data, or at the very least, not interpreting it correctly. In the end, I talked to one of the team’s programmers, Theo Karras, and he agreed to come with me to check things out.”

  “Even though you’d been told not to.”

  The dark eyes glinted at her as he looked up suddenly and seemed to pin her in place with his stare. “Do you always do what you’re told, Captain Evans?”

  Generally, no, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. “If it means saving my own skin, then yeah, most of the time I’ll let my self-interest do the talking.”

  He shook his head. “Well, I guess my scientific curiosity overrode my sense of self-preservation. So Karras and I borrowed a vehicle — ”

  “Stole,” she broke in.

  “Commandeered,” he amended, and despite the overall serious cast to his features, she thought she detected a small twitch at the corner of his mouth. “And we headed out to the nearest air processor. When we ran the diagnostics, everything seemed to be working fine. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one, but they’re big, about five meters square, and we were careful to park our vehicle so it couldn’t be seen from the road.” His expression sobered abruptly. “Funny thing, that road. You’ve probably seen the images, how every street and highway and footpath was choked with people fleeing the Cloud. People died where they stood. And yet that road was so empty we could’ve gone two hundred kilometers an hour on it.”

  “Maybe the advance team cleared it off so your people wouldn’t have to worry about access to the air processors,” Cassidy suggested. It seemed obvious enough to her. What was the point in bringing in a team if they couldn’t navigate anywhere?

  “That’s what Karras said. And I was willing to go along with him…until I saw the convoy going by.”

  “Convoy?”

  “Military vehicles flanking a long line of open-bed haulers.” He took in a breath, gaze seemingly fixed on her, but Cassidy got the feeling he wasn’t looking at her at all, was instead seeing the desolation that used to be the most populated country on the planet. “And in those haulers were bodies. Hundreds…no, thousands…of bodies.”

  “But — ” She broke off, mind flailing at the wrongness of what he’d just told her. Everything that had been written about GARP and its objectives said the goal was to dispose of all those bodies humanely, to treat them with the reverence they deserved. Being told that the remains of the Cloud’s victims had been piled up like so much cordwood was just…wrong.

  “I know,” he said grimly. “Neither of us could believe it. So we waited until the convoy passed, then followed them. I don’t think they paid us any attention because, after all, we were driving a vehicle with clear GEC markings. They probably thought we were with them.”

  “So where were they going?”

  “Some sort of processing facility. We didn’t stick around long enough to get the particulars. It was enough that it existed. Anyway, Karras said he’d investigate on his end, that it would be a lot more efficient for him to do some discreet hacking and find out what was going on
that way, rather than trying to sneak around and play detective, and probably get caught.”

  But you got caught anyway, she thought, although she didn’t bother to say the words out loud. “So I’m guessing he found something.”

  “You could say that.” Derek Tagawa slumped back in his seat, shoulders drooping. “What they were processing in that facility was the corpses.”

  “Wait…what?” That couldn’t be right. This Theo Karras person must have made some mistake.

  He gave her a mirthless smile. “That was my first reaction. That is, we knew the government was performing salvage operations, collecting valuables as it remediated the area. Payment for the work being done, and not that many people have ever protested because, after all, in general there aren’t a lot of relatives left around to protest. But this was something else. What Theo found was that anything of value in the bodies was being extracted — gold teeth, titanium joint replacements, that sort of thing. And then the corpses were being ground down to nothing. You know all those new terrace farms the government’s been touting, saying they’ve upped production on a massive scale?”

  Cassidy could only tilt her head slightly. She didn’t want to say anything, because a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach told her what was coming next.

  “Well, guess where they’re getting all the phosphorous for their fertilizer?”

  “That can’t be true,” she said. Actually, it came out more as a whisper.

  “I’m afraid it is.”

  Her stomach lurched, and she gripped the edge of her seat and told herself that she was not going to throw up. She just wasn’t. The roiling settled down somewhat, but she still felt like someone had just punched her in the gut.

  “So…what happened?” In a way, she hated herself for asking the question. At the beginning of this, hadn’t she vowed that she wouldn’t believe a word he said? For some reason, it was hard to not believe him. She wouldn’t call herself an expert on human nature or anything, but something in the way he told the story seemed to ring true. If he were really a criminal, wouldn’t he have come up with a far less elaborate lie to prove his innocence? Her father had always said, “If you’re going to lie, make it a simple one, or you’ll end up losing track of the facts.”